What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word

06Nov

I had been editing a document for a client. I added some comments in the margin, as always – but when my client opened it and when I re-opened it, to my horror and his, all of the text boxes containing the comments had gone TINY and unreadable. It looked like this:

It apparently happens if you’re working with a document originally created in an older version of Word which doesn’t have the requisite Styles set up for comment boxes. You then work on it in Word 2007 or Word 2010 (this solution works for both!) and the horror happens …

It took me and Matthew longer than it should have to work out what to do, as there didn’t seem to be an easily found solution if you searched for one online – so as an aide memoire for me, for next time it happens, and as a public service for anyone else trying to work out what to do … here’s what you do (now edited to add screen shots).

Note for experts: if you’re already familiar with Styles, note that you need to change the Balloon Text.

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word documents:

Let’s look at what the full horror looks like first of all:

First of all: don’t panic! The comments will have typically gone into Times at 1 point. But there is a way to make them readable again.

Open the document. Don’t highlight anything. Don’t put the cursor into a comment box.

Now you can do one of two things. Either hit Control + Alt + Shift + s all at the same time, or make sure you’re in the Home tab and click on the little tiny arrow at the bottom right of the Styles menu – this will bring up the full Styles dialogue box.

Using either of these methods, you will bring up the Styles dialogue box.

This looks like a very useful dialogue box, but for our purposes you need to ignore all of it except the three buttons at the bottom. Click on the rightmost button: Manage Styles to bring up yet another dialogue box.

We’re not there yet: the sort order shows as Recommended – but you need to click on the down arrow to change it to Alphabetical:

Once it’s in alphabetical order, it’s relatively easy to find Balloon Text (note: not Comment text) and you will see that it then confirms how you have your text set up (blue circle). Click the Modify button …

Now you can change your font (which will probably have defaulted to Times) and font size (which will probably have defaulted to 1). You’ll notice lots of other options (blue circle) to change the spacing, etc. – I don’t usually worry about changing those, but this is where they are if you want them – and of course you use this menu to change the styles on headings, normal text, etc., too. Press the OK button, and carry on pressing OK buttons until you get back to your document.

Note that these tips are primarily for Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 for PC. Most of them will work for Word for Mac, although you may find some menus in different places. This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

Related

339 responses to “What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word”

Patricia Fogarty

December 5, 2011 at 1:00 pm

Thanks so much for this! Want to note that, using Word 2007 on a PC, I needed to highlight the whole doc before the rest of the steps would “take.” But once I made that one adjustment, my bacon was indeed saved. So glad you were there with this advice.

Thank you very much for taking the time to comment, and I’m so pleased I was able to help. Having to highlight it all didn’t happen to me, but that’s well worth knowing for other people who might be in the same boat!

Liz, I read this post from 2011 and am hopeful you still leave comments. My problem is the fong changes to tiny in the whole document, not comment boxes. Now I use Word 2010 but when opening older versions of documents is when it seems to happen.

Thanks for your comment, Lori, and yes, I still respond to comments on all of my posts! Have you followed the specific procedure here to change only the text in the comment boxes? Have you tried setting the main text to “Normal” first to make sure it hasn’t got an odd and inappropriate style attached to it?

Many thanks for this, massive help. I had this problem while working in Word 2010 so didn’t have to highlight the body text; worked fine as you described. [Also managed fine without screenshots; I wouldn’t worry about them for the extra effort required!]

Thanks again, very much appreciated; the tiny comment boxes were really starting to annoy me!

Dear Al, I’m so happy I was able to help (and it’s good to have feedback about Word 2010, too!). And thanks for the info about the screenshots: I have been adding them to my more recent posts about more basic aspects of Word, but I think that if someone’s working with comment boxes, then they are probably OK with just following the instructions. Thank you for taking the time to comment, as it’s good to know I’m helping!

Thanks for your comment. A quick search would suggest that you use the same Styles menu in Word for Mac; again, you need to make it show you all of the styles, not just the ones it intitially offers. Have a go, and if that doesn’t work, or if you’ve tried that already, let me know and I’ll consult with my pet Mac-user, Linda.

I was recommended to come here by Katherine Moore O’Klopf (an EFA colleague), and I managed to fix the problem with some tweaks (I’m working in Word 2003). “Control + Alt + Shift + S” didn’t bring anything up for me, so here is what I did:

1. Go to the Format tab drop-down menu in Word, and click Styles and Formatting.
2. Go to Balloon text, and click Modify on the drop-down menu.
3. Change your font size as needed. Mine was originally set to “1” (!), and I changed it to 10.

Hope this helps someone working in an earlier version of Word. Now on to the fix for comment boxes reading right to left!

Thanks for that, Lisa. With your permission, I will add that to the post. I don’t have a copy of Word 2003 any more, so it’s useful to have this information. Also, I wrote this post as a quick reminder to myself, and this serves as reminder to beef it up with some screenshots, like my later posts in the series.

Thanks very much Liz. I had the same problem once and followed your instructions all the way to the style menu, where unfortunately I had a frustrating five minutes playing around with the ‘Comments text’. I’d never even noticed there was a separate style for balloons!

I’m glad I could help – I do mention that it’s Balloon Text you need, but I’ll see if I can make that more prominent! I know it’s a bit odd, as why would you want them separate, but that’s the joy of Word!

This was a big help – saved me a lot of time! I’m glad I thought to google this problem before I spent too long trying to trouble-shoot, because I never would have figured that solution out on my own! I appreciated the screen shots as well.

Thank you! When I encountered this problem, I was the middle of editing my students’ papers to give them some advice before they submit them to me for a grade, and without having the comments readable, my task would have taken hours longer!

When I originally left a comment I seem to have clicked on the -Notify me when new
comments are added- checkbox and from now on every time a comment is added I recieve 4 emails with the same comment.
Is there a means you can remove me from that service?
Thank you!

Hi there, I’m afraid I can’t remove that myself for you. But at the bottom of the notification email you should have a link to manage notifications or some such message. Click there and you get a list of your notifications, which you can then untick to remove notifications on new comments on this and any other comment threads or, indeed, blogs, if you have signed up for emails from any. Hope that helps!

This has just helped me sort out comment boxes that were spreading all across the page (making them equally unreadable) – I would never have found the right part of Word to adjust this in without having read this. Thank you!

You’re welcome – I think I also get so many comments because there are not many reliable sources of information on this problem. I’m not sure whether it happens so much in Word 2013; it would be interesting to know the versions people are using!

Thank you for this. I was in despair after editing a long, heavily formatted taxonomic chapter which I could not afford to cut and paste as text and lose all the formatting. This worked like a charm. In Word 2007 the ‘Manage styles’ is just an icon for me (the third one AA plus pencil) – but once you select it then all flows exactly as you describe. Wonderful solution.

Thank you for your comment. All of the relevant links to RSS, email subscription and my newsletter are to the top right of the screen when viewed on a desktop computer. The links are at the bottom of the page when viewed on a mobile or tablet.

Had this problem just now with a document at work. Quick Google search led me to your website and your solution was great. Thank you for taking the time to do this, you definitely saved me a lot of time and frustration 🙂

Thanks for the comment – I had forgotten to add to the bottom of this post that these tips work for Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 for PC but can’t be guaranteed to work for Mac, but have added that now. Let me know if you find a solution for your particular version and feel free to share it in a comment for other readers to see.

Thank you. My Mac has some differences from your basic instructions but with your help and a bit of random thrashing about I have managed to change the font size. I probably would never have got there without you.

Nevermind, I figured it out. I have to go to the bottom of the Styles and Formatting area and select the drop-down for the “Show:” box and choose Custom. The balloons box wasn’t checked off so it wasn’t appearing. I followed your steps from there. Thanks!

Dear Liz,
Many thanks for the helpful explanation. I’ve succeeded in increasing the font size, but I continue to have problems with the font type and size consistency…
Evn though I have clearly selected Tahoma size 8 as the prefered font type, Word 2013 will only change the first balloon correctly. All others (including new additional comments) are all shown in Times New Roman size 10.

Hm, interesting. Have you pressed all of the OK buttons as you go back through the stages to the main Word screen, and ticked anything that might ask if you want to continue working in that format for all other comments?

Thank You very much Liz for the good work. It helped me much:-) I tried to resolve it sooner in styles too, however, I was not successful and I have believed that it is not possible to change the size from only 10 or 8 to the bigger one. Thanks a lot:-) Jaroslav from Czech Republic

And thanks from another Karin – I have just got back from a break and found a document a client had returned had this problem. A google search came up with your post first and I was quickly able to deal with it. I’ll now bookmark the page in case it ever happens again.

Thank you!!! This was driving me nuts as I couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t be seen. I had tried highlighting the comment box text and increasing the font size, but it didn’t help. Definitely wouldn’t have come up with this solution myself!

I don’t know why this is so hard to find online, but I know that it is, because that’s why I wrote this, my very first Word Tips blog post, primarily for myself when I first encountered the problem! Thanks for sharing the post!

Thank you for saving my workday! 🙂 I tried to survive using vertical reviewing pane because thought this small text horror is something built in and inevitable. A moment came I lost my patience, googled and voila! You helped! 🙂

Thank you so much! This information turned what would have been a nightmare afternoon of editing into a normal job. I have no idea how you finally found this fix, but perhaps you should go into detective work.

I found it buried in several corners of the Internet – this was the first blog post in my Word tips series that I wrote, and I wrote it initially to have a record for myself for when it happened again! I’m so glad it’s been useful for so many people.

My afternoon was rapidly circling the drain when I came across your post. I kept changing the Comment Text style and getting increasingly frustrated when the tiny boxes refused to go away. Who would have known you had to change Balloon Text and not Comment Text? It doesn’t help that Balloon Text is hidden from the list of available styles by default, so you have to know it’s there to find it. Thanks for saving my day.

Thank you Liz, I read your post on, “What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word,” as I am a lawyer and constantly face “tiny comment box issues :),” Your guidelines were spot on and “the control alt shift s process,” was easy and a quick fix to the years on wonder on what to do…Thank you

You are my hero. I’ve just been upgraded 😛 to Office 2013, so it’s a tiny bit different (the >manage styles< button is one of three buttons with icons that you have to mouse over to figure out what each does), but it would have taken FOREVER (the canine perception of time according to George Carlin) for me to figure that out on my own without your clear instructions. A thousand blessings upon you and your'n.

Bless you! I should have known it was in Styles. Balloon didn’t come up at first in the Edit list like other readers mentioned but it was in the Restrict list. When I clicked on it there, it came up on the Edit list.

I know we can expand the widt of the revision balloon but is there anything to expand the height so that it shows ENTIRE comment you have placed in the revision balloon? Rather than clicking on the down arrow and seeing the comment.

A document sent to me for my comments but when I was entering my comment, a little tiny font size which i was unable to see was appearing. I followed your procedure but it didn’t worked. Is there anything additional I can work

Can’t tell you how grateful I am to have found your detailed explanation. We have been plagued with the compressed comments boxes on numerous documents recently that are circulated for multiple reviews. It’s been really frustrating and time consuming. I had no idea it was related to comment font size! There will be a lot less grumbling about document reviews now that we know how to fix this. Thank you!!